OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Pre-Trained and Attention-Based Neural Networks for Building Noetic Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

The NOESIS II challenge, as the Track 2 of the 8th Dialogue System Technology Challenges (DSTC 8), is the extension of DSTC 7. This track incorporates new elements that are vital for the creation of a deployed task-oriented dialogue system. This paper describes our systems that are evaluated on all subtasks under this challenge. We study the problem of employing pre-trained attention-based network for multi-turn dialogue systems. Meanwhile, several adaptation methods are proposed to adapt the pre-trained language models for multi-turn dialogue systems, in order to keep the intrinsic property of dialogue systems. In the released evaluation results of Track 2 of DSTC 8, our proposed models ranked fourth in subtask 1, third in subtask 2, and first in subtask 3 and subtask 4 respectively.
A Dependency Syntactic Knowledge Augmented Interactive Architecture for End-to-End Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

The aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) task remains to be a long-standing challenge, which aims to extract the aspect term and then identify its sentiment orientation.In previous approaches, the explicit syntactic structure of a sentence, which reflects the syntax properties of natural language and hence is intuitively crucial for aspect term extraction and sentiment recognition, is typically neglected or insufficiently modeled. In this paper, we thus propose a novel dependency syntactic knowledge augmented interactive architecture with multi-task learning for end-to-end ABSA. This model is capable of fully exploiting the syntactic knowledge (dependency relations and types) by leveraging a well-designed Dependency Relation Embedded Graph Convolutional Network (DreGcn). Additionally, we design a simple yet effective message-passing mechanism to ensure that our model learns from multiple related tasks in a multi-task learning framework. Extensive experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Besides, we achieve further improvements by using BERT as an additional feature extractor.
Fine grained classification for multi-source land cover mapping
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Nowadays, there is a general agreement on the need to better characterize agricultural monitoring systems in response to the global changes. Timely and accurate land use/land cover mapping can support this vision by providing useful information at fine scale. Here, a deep learning approach is proposed to deal with multi-source land cover mapping at object level. The approach is based on an extension of Recurrent Neural Network enriched via an attention mechanism dedicated to multi-temporal data context. Moreover, a new hierarchical pretraining strategy designed to exploit specific domain knowledge available under hierarchical relationships within land cover classes is introduced. Experiments carried out on the Reunion island - a french overseas department - demonstrate the significance of the proposal compared to remote sensing standard approaches for land cover mapping.
What is BitChute? Characterizing the "Free Speech" Alternative to YouTube
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we characterize the content and discourse on BitChute, a social video-hosting platform. Launched in 2017 as an alternative to YouTube, BitChute joins an ecosystem of alternative, low content moderation platforms, including Gab, Voat, Minds, and 4chan. Uniquely, BitChute is the first of these alternative platforms to focus on video content and is growing in popularity. Our analysis reveals several key characteristics of the platform. We find that only a handful of channels receive any engagement, and almost all of those channels contain conspiracies or hate speech. This high rate of hate speech on the platform as a whole, much of which is anti-Semitic, is particularly concerning. Our results suggest that BitChute has a higher rate of hate speech than Gab but less than 4chan. Lastly, we find that while some BitChute content producers have been banned from other platforms, many maintain profiles on mainstream social media platforms, particularly YouTube. This paper contributes a first look at the content and discourse on BitChute and provides a building block for future research on low content moderation platforms.
Generating Rationales in Visual Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Despite recent advances in Visual QuestionAnswering (VQA), it remains a challenge todetermine how much success can be attributedto sound reasoning and comprehension ability.We seek to investigate this question by propos-ing a new task ofrationale generation. Es-sentially, we task a VQA model with generat-ing rationales for the answers it predicts. Weuse data from the Visual Commonsense Rea-soning (VCR) task, as it contains ground-truthrationales along with visual questions and an-swers. We first investigate commonsense un-derstanding in one of the leading VCR mod-els, ViLBERT, by generating rationales frompretrained weights using a state-of-the-art lan-guage model, GPT-2. Next, we seek to jointlytrain ViLBERT with GPT-2 in an end-to-endfashion with the dual task of predicting the an-swer in VQA and generating rationales. Weshow that this kind of training injects com-monsense understanding in the VQA modelthrough quantitative and qualitative evaluationmetrics
Optimization of Image Embeddings for Few Shot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper we improve the image embeddings generated in the graph neural network solution for few shot learning. We propose alternate architectures for existing networks such as Inception-Net, U-Net, Attention U-Net, and Squeeze-Net to generate embeddings and increase the accuracy of the models. We improve the quality of embeddings created at the cost of the time taken to generate them. The proposed implementations outperform the existing state of the art methods for 1-shot and 5-shot learning on the Omniglot dataset. The experiments involved a testing set and training set which had no common classes between them. The results for 5-way and 10-way/20-way tests have been tabulated.
Correction to: A Practical, Provably Linear Time, In-place and Stable Merge Algorithm via the Perfect Shuffle
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

We correct a paper previously submitted to CoRR. That paper claimed that the algorithm there described was provably of linear time complexity in the average case. The alleged proof of that statement contained an error, being based on an invalid assumption, and is invalid. In this paper we present both experimental and analytical evidence that the time complexity is of order $N^2$ in the average case, where $N$ is the total length of the merged sequences.
Using Machine Learning Approach for Computational Substructure in Real-Time Hybrid Simulation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Hybrid simulation (HS) is a widely used structural testing method that combines a computational substructure with a numerical model for well-understood components and an experimental substructure for other parts of the structure that are physically tested. One challenge for fast HS or real-time HS (RTHS) is associated with the analytical substructures of relatively complex structures, which could have large number of degrees of freedoms (DOFs), for instance. These large DOFs computations could be hard to perform in real-time, even with the all current hardware capacities. In this study, a metamodeling technique is proposed to represent the structural dynamic behavior of the analytical substructure. A preliminary study is conducted where a one-bay one-story concentrically braced frame (CBF) is tested under earthquake loading by using a compact HS setup at the University of Nevada, Reno. The experimental setup allows for using a small-scale brace as the experimental substructure combined with a steel frame at the prototype full-scale for the analytical substructure. Two different machine learning algorithms are evaluated to provide a valid and useful metamodeling solution for analytical substructure. The metamodels are trained with the available data that is obtained from the pure analytical solution of the prototype steel frame. The two algorithms used for developing the metamodels are: (1) linear regression (LR) model, and (2) basic recurrent neural network (RNN). The metamodels are first validated against the pure analytical response of the structure. Next, RTHS experiments are conducted by using metamodels. RTHS test results using both LR and RNN models are evaluated, and the advantages and disadvantages of these models are discussed.
Inferring Network Structure From Data
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

Networks are complex models for underlying data in many application domains. In most instances, raw data is not natively in the form of a network, but derived from sensors, logs, images, or other data. Yet, the impact of the various choices in translating this data to a network have been largely unexamined. In this work, we propose a network model selection methodology that focuses on evaluating a network's utility for varying tasks, together with an efficiency measure which selects the most parsimonious model. We demonstrate that this network definition matters in several ways for modeling the behavior of the underlying system.
Emotional Video to Audio Transformation Using Deep Recurrent Neural Networks and a Neuro-Fuzzy System
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2020
Year: 2020

Generating music with emotion similar to that of an input video is a very relevant issue nowadays. Video content creators and automatic movie directors benefit from maintaining their viewers engaged, which can be facilitated by producing novel material eliciting stronger emotions in them. Moreover, there's currently a demand for more empathetic computers to aid humans in applications such as augmenting the perception ability of visually and/or hearing impaired people. Current approaches overlook the video's emotional characteristics in the music generation step, only consider static images instead of videos, are unable to generate novel music, and require a high level of human effort and skills. In this study, we propose a novel hybrid deep neural network that uses an Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System to predict a video's emotion from its visual features and a deep Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network to generate its corresponding audio signals with similar emotional inkling. The former is able to appropriately model emotions due to its fuzzy properties, and the latter is able to model data with dynamic time properties well due to the availability of the previous hidden state information. The novelty of our proposed method lies in the extraction of visual emotional features in order to transform them into audio signals with corresponding emotional aspects for users. Quantitative experiments show low mean absolute errors of 0.217 and 0.255 in the Lindsey and DEAP datasets respectively, and similar global features in the spectrograms. This indicates that our model is able to appropriately perform domain transformation between visual and audio features. Based on experimental results, our model can effectively generate audio that matches the scene eliciting a similar emotion from the viewer in both datasets, and music generated by our model is also chosen more often.
Adding A Filter Based on The Discriminator to Improve Unconditional Text Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

The autoregressive language model (ALM) trained with maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is widely used in unconditional text generation. Due to exposure bias, the generated texts still suffer from low quality and diversity. This presents statistically as a discrepancy between the real text and generated text. Some research shows a discriminator can detect this discrepancy. Because the discriminator can encode more information than the generator, discriminator has the potentiality to improve generator. To alleviate the exposure bias, generative adversarial networks (GAN) use the discriminator to update the generator's parameters directly, but they fail by being evaluated precisely. A critical reason for the failure is the difference between the discriminator input and the ALM input. We propose a novel mechanism by adding a filter which has the same input as the discriminator. First, discriminator detects the discrepancy signals and passes to filter directly (or by learning). Then, we use the filter to reject some generated samples with a sampling-based method. Thus, the original generative distribution is revised to reduce the discrepancy. Two ALMs, RNN-based and Transformer-based, are experimented. Evaluated precisely by three metrics, our mechanism consistently outperforms the ALMs and all kinds of GANs across two benchmark data sets.
Approximate Manifold Defense Against Multiple Adversarial Perturbations
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Existing defenses against adversarial attacks are typically tailored to a specific perturbation type. Using adversarial training to defend against multiple types of perturbation requires expensive adversarial examples from different perturbation types at each training step. In contrast, manifold-based defense incorporates a generative network to project an input sample onto the clean data manifold. This approach eliminates the need to generate expensive adversarial examples while achieving robustness against multiple perturbation types. However, the success of this approach relies on whether the generative network can capture the complete clean data manifold, which remains an open problem for complex input domain. In this work, we devise an approximate manifold defense mechanism, called RBF-CNN, for image classification. Instead of capturing the complete data manifold, we use an RBF layer to learn the density of small image patches. RBF-CNN also utilizes a reconstruction layer that mitigates any minor adversarial perturbations. Further, incorporating our proposed reconstruction process for training improves the adversarial robustness of our RBF-CNN models. Experiment results on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets indicate that RBF-CNN offers robustness for multiple perturbations without the need for expensive adversarial training.
Confident Coreset for Active Learning in Medical Image Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Recent advances in deep learning have resulted in great successes in various applications. Although semi-supervised or unsupervised learning methods have been widely investigated, the performance of deep neural networks highly depends on the annotated data. The problem is that the budget for annotation is usually limited due to the annotation time and expensive annotation cost in medical data. Active learning is one of the solutions to this problem where an active learner is designed to indicate which samples need to be annotated to effectively train a target model. In this paper, we propose a novel active learning method, confident coreset, which considers both uncertainty and distribution for effectively selecting informative samples. By comparative experiments on two medical image analysis tasks, we show that our method outperforms other active learning methods.
Speaker Recognition using SincNet and X-Vector Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we propose an innovative approach to perform speaker recognition by fusing two recently introduced deep neural networks (DNNs) namely - SincNet and X-Vector. The idea behind using SincNet filters on the raw speech waveform is to extract more distinguishing frequency-related features in the initial convolution layers of the CNN architecture. X-Vectors are used to take advantage of the fact that this embedding is an efficient method to churn out fixed dimension features from variable length speech utterances, something which is challenging in plain CNN techniques, making it efficient both in terms of speed and accuracy. Our approach uses the best of both worlds by combining X-vector in the later layers while using SincNet filters in the initial layers of our deep model. This approach allows the network to learn better embedding and converge quicker. Previous works use either X-Vector or SincNet Filters or some modifications, however we introduce a novel fusion architecture wherein we have combined both the techniques to gather more information about the speech signal hence, giving us better results. Our method focuses on the VoxCeleb1 dataset for speaker recognition, and we have used it for both training and testing purposes.
FALCON: Honest-Majority Maliciously Secure Framework for Private Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

We propose Falcon, an end-to-end 3-party protocol for efficient private training and inference of large machine learning models. Falcon presents four main advantages - (i) It is highly expressive with support for high capacity networks such as VGG16 (ii) it supports batch normalization which is important for training complex networks such as AlexNet (iii) Falcon guarantees security with abort against malicious adversaries, assuming an honest majority (iv) Lastly, Falcon presents new theoretical insights for protocol design that make it highly efficient and allow it to outperform existing secure deep learning solutions. Compared to prior art for private inference, we are about 8x faster than SecureNN (PETS'19) on average and comparable to ABY3 (CCS'18). We are about 16-200x more communication efficient than either of these. For private training, we are about 6x faster than SecureNN, 4.4x faster than ABY3 and about 2-60x more communication efficient. Our experiments in the WAN setting show that over large networks and datasets, compute operations dominate the overall latency of MPC, as opposed to the communication.
Investigations on c-(almost) perfect nonlinear functions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

In a prior paper [14], along with P. Ellingsen, P. Felke and A. Tkachenko, we defined a new (output) multiplicative differential, and the corresponding c-differential uniformity, which has the potential of extending differential cryptanalysis. Here, we continue the work, by looking at some APN functions through the mentioned concept and show that their c-differential uniformity increases significantly, in some cases.
Personalization in Human-AI Teams: Improving the Compatibility-Accuracy Tradeoff
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

AI systems that model and interact with users can update their models over time to reflect new information and changes in the environment. Although these updates may improve the overall performance of the AI system, they may actually hurt the performance with respect to individual users. Prior work has studied the trade-off between improving the system's accuracy following an update and the compatibility of the updated system with prior user experience. The more the model is forced to be compatible with a prior version, the higher loss in accuracy it will incur. In this paper, we show that by personalizing the loss function to specific users, in some cases it is possible to improve the compatibility-accuracy trade-off with respect to these users (increase the compatibility of the model while sacrificing less accuracy). We present experimental results indicating that this approach provides moderate improvements on average (around 20%) but large improvements for certain users (up to 300%).
Learning Over Dirty Data Without Cleaning
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

Real-world datasets are dirty and contain many errors. Examples of these issues are violations of integrity constraints, duplicates, and inconsistencies in representing data values and entities. Learning over dirty databases may result in inaccurate models. Users have to spend a great deal of time and effort to repair data errors and create a clean database for learning. Moreover, as the information required to repair these errors is not often available, there may be numerous possible clean versions for a dirty database. We propose DLearn, a novel relational learning system that learns directly over dirty databases effectively and efficiently without any preprocessing. DLearn leverages database constraints to learn accurate relational models over inconsistent and heterogeneous data. Its learned models represent patterns over all possible clean instances of the data in a usable form. Our empirical study indicates that DLearn learns accurate models over large real-world databases efficiently.
SINDy-PI: A Robust Algorithm for Parallel Implicit Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Accurately modeling the nonlinear dynamics of a system from measurement data is a challenging yet vital topic. The sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics (SINDy) algorithm is one approach to discover dynamical systems models from data. Although extensions have been developed to identify implicit dynamics, or dynamics described by rational functions, these extensions are extremely sensitive to noise. In this work, we develop SINDy-PI (parallel, implicit), a robust variant of the SINDy algorithm to identify implicit dynamics and rational nonlinearities. The SINDy-PI framework includes multiple optimization algorithms and a principled approach to model selection. We demonstrate the ability of this algorithm to learn implicit ordinary and partial differential equations and conservation laws from limited and noisy data. In particular, we show that the proposed approach is several orders of magnitude more noise robust than previous approaches, and may be used to identify a class of complex ODE and PDE dynamics that were previously unattainable with SINDy, including for the double pendulum dynamics and the Belousov Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction.
Online information on medical cannabis may rise unrealistic expectations and downplay potential side effects
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

There is a growing literature on the potential medical uses of Cannabis sativa and cannabinoid compounds. Although these have only been approved by regulatory agencies for few indications, there is a hype about their possible benefits in a variety of conditions and a large market in the wellness industry. As in many cases patients search for information on cannabis products online, we have analyzed the information on medical cannabis available on the Internet. Analyzing 176 webpages returned by a search engine, we found that more than half of them were news websites. Pain, epilepsy and multiple sclerosis were the most frequently therapeutic areas mentioned by the webpages, which did not always match those for which there is regulatory approval. Information was also incomplete, with only 22% of the webpages mentioning potential side effects. Health portal websites provided the most complete information. On average, 80% of webpages had a neutral stance on the potential benefits of medical cannabis, with commercial websites having more frequently a positive stance (67%). We conclude that the information that can be found online could raise unrealistic expectations regarding therapeutic areas for which science-based evidence is often still weak.